Get off your high horse. Do you think this is new? We saw it with Hearst and his papers, we undoubtedly had it in the radio era though I'm too young to be able to provide names. There has always been more focus on celebrity than there was on anything else.

Richard Dawkins is still a celebrity. He's a prominent and brilliant scientist who writes bestsellers on the side. Culture is no worse off than it was a hundred years ago. There's just more of it, and that means there's more of the tripe along with more of the good, and that means that for all the twenty-year-old cynics there's even more to wearily shake heads at. Recall that a hundred years ago, the idea of a global community where enlightened people commented on tech stories would have been an impossibility.